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Introduction

Our domain of interest is music. We visualized information about trends in the music industry to allow viewers to learn more about how their music preferences compare. Additionally, we hope to discover and showcase patterns in music that becomes popular. For musicians, it is critical to unerstand what aspects of music lead to commercial success. Many factors, including speed, genre, dancability, and energy play a role in the likelihood that a song will “hit.” This analysis can also be used to help a prospective musician make choices about the type of music to produce, if they wish to gain popularity.

Summary

There are 1000 rows in our dataset (Top 50 Spotify songs by each country). Overall, Carol of the Bells is the loudest song, and Hauli Hauli (From “De De Pyaar De”), Gurenge is the song with the highest energy level. Knowing how a loud song and or high energy song sounds like will give insights to musicians on different song features. Songs from Colombia has the highest average danceability level. Moreover, songs from Brazil have the loudest value. From the two data above, we can understand music characteristics certain countries have.

Aggregate Table by Genre

Genre Popularity (0 to 100) BPM Energy Dance-ability Liveliness
rnb 78.30000 127.90000 62.30000 58.10000 9.90000
edm 71.76316 115.10526 70.47368 64.23684 13.94737
house 71.40000 128.80000 76.40000 53.20000 25.60000
pop 70.67647 120.88971 67.95588 64.79412 16.93382
boy band 69.66667 116.13333 80.26667 63.80000 15.20000
dance pop 64.32733 118.67267 72.81081 65.60961 18.66066
hip hop 63.43478 99.82609 68.26087 66.47826 20.91304
british soul 62.18182 116.72727 51.09091 52.72727 12.45455
neo mellow 60.00000 109.11111 40.66667 52.77778 11.77778
permanent wave 58.75000 137.25000 65.00000 42.75000 15.25000
indie 58.25000 139.50000 74.50000 55.50000 35.75000
latin 53.40000 132.20000 73.80000 73.00000 16.20000

Organized by genre and sorted from greatest to least popularity score, this table contains the average data for each category. This table reveals that there are no clear patterns or correlations between these measurements and popularity. For example, beats per minute is relatively high on both ends of the popularity scale. Energy also seems patternless. However, the average measurements may indicate the general “recipe” for popular songs instead of the correlation amongst genres stats and popularity.

Charts

Country BPM Chart

Music tastes vary from country to country. While one country may prefer faster, more energetic songs, another may prefer slower, calmer songs. A musician may be interested to know what their country prefers. This chart shows the average speed and energy level of top 50 songs in various countries. To view which country each bar represents, hover over it.

A bar chart based on speed was chosen over a scatterplot based on speed and energy to more clearly juxtapose speed, the more important of the two variables. Energy level, a more ordinal type of measure, was encoded with color to simply show “high energy” and “low energy”, rather than “exactly x amount of energy.”

As seen in the chart, the majority of countries group around the 125 BPM area. However, there are clear outliers. Brazil has, on average, the fastest and highest energy music. In contrast, Indonesia has quite slow and calm music. One interesting point is the USA. Although the average BPM is roughly the average of the world, the energy level is the lowest of all the countries. Maybe it has to do with that good ol’ country twang, or maybe it’s Adelle. Regardless, the chart highlights that it’s worth looking into.

Top Genres in the US from the Last Decade

This pie chart was intended to show the breakdown of music trends over the past decade through the relationship between genre and popularity. Using angles and colors to highlight the quantitative information, this visual displays the range in popularity of music genres. This graph shows that dance pop and pop fittingly dominated the genres of the most popular songs in the 2010s. Following pop, EDM and hip hop were the next most popular respectively. Although having the third greatest percentages, misc. indicates the total number of songs of genres that had fewer than 4 total hit songs over the given years.